Have you ever felt like things just seem to go wrong whenever you decide to take a step towards what you really want to do in life?

Not the politically correct ambitions like getting a law degree or getting a promotion at work (although things can and do often go wrong here also), but the real dreams that keep you up awake at night and fill you with excitement. Maybe you don’t even share these with family, but they’re dreams that truly correspond with your desires.

Have you ever tried acting on these, or even worse sharing these? What generally tends to happen?

Do your usually understanding and supportive friends (who outwardly want you to go fulfil your dreams and give lip service to the importance of this) act normal? Or have you ever experienced a friend who declares to want what’s best for you, suddenly fill your mind with “what if” scenarios and other seeds of doubt? And if they don’t stop you in your tracks with well reasoned arguments (out of nowhere), with why maybe that’s not the best thing to do “right now”, then comes the even bigger mistake of sharing a slight inclination to move in the direction that excites you with family.

This last trap, sometimes leads to you setting off some kind of enemy trip wire and all of a sudden you’re subjected to a barrage of “what if that doesn’t work?”, “how will you make money?”, “what if you fail?”, “but what about…?”.

Perhaps, what I’ve just described doesn’t correspond with your experience. If so, then you are very lucky to have truly understanding and supportive friends and family, however, if you’ve been reading this far and you recall a scenario when you did express a desire to move in a certain direction that corresponded with your true desires and what excites you and some kind of obstacle or subtle reprimand was issued I’ll lay out why I don’t think this was an accident.

Take a look around at society. Everyone’s pretty happy and content with their lives aren’t they? Just kidding ;). It’s pretty obvious when you sit down with most people that they have plenty of dissatisfactions with life. Your friends will tell you all about their problems and their friends problems without an invitation. They’re sort of content to listen to your issues also.

They’ll tell you about why they dislike their job, why they dislike their coworkers, why they dislike their boss, or their relationship, or why they have problems with family etc. Unfortunately, the truth is that although there are some generally happy people in the world these people are in the minority, whilst the majority mostly consists of people with varying degrees of dissatisfaction with life. Basically, the norm is a society of complainers.

Let’s go deeper. What mood is someone in when they complain? Let’s break it down into 3 categories for simplicity. Happy, neutral and unhappy all with varying degrees.

Well, let’s admit they’re probably somewhat unhappy if they’re complaining they might not be completely depressed, but if someone is complaining their is some level of dissatisfaction that person is experiencing, you can’t even class it as a neutral mood although most people have confused this underlying dissatisfaction and unhappiness as “normal”.

So getting back to your dreams. What’s the problem when you talk about moving in the direction that excites you?

When you say I think I’ll just do XYZ, to family or friends? Why are they so quick to fill you with negative future projections and seeds of doubt?

Well let me propose an explanation. You see, they’re not even probably aware that they are doing it.

But when you talk about something that excites you, which of the 3 categories has that already moved you into (happy, neutral, unhappy). I would argue you’ve already left the mild discontentment of the masses and moved straight past neutral and into happy.

And by even mentioning an idea you’re excited about this changes your physiology you start to develop a certain glint in your eye, your body language and demeanour change you might even start giving off subconscious signals of being somewhat mildly happy when talking about your aspiration.

And in doing so you have committed the cardinal sin! You see it’s an unwritten rule of society that nothing pisses an unhappy person off more than seeing someone else happy. The person you have communicated your intent to has in fractions of a second picked up a change of atmosphere, something about the tone of the interaction has altered and all of a sudden out of nowhere they’ve already fallen into a knee jerk reaction of subtly yet implicitly pissing on your parade. It’s very insidious and the person if asked would almost always state that “of course they want the best for you and to follow your dreams” yet in the moment their actions convey a different message.

It is almost a double bind subtle hypocrisy of our culture and human nature, whether you want to call it crabs in a bucket or tall poppy syndrome. The fact is it happens.

Now granted not everyone is like this. I have found that people who are happy and truly chasing their own dreams in life will encourage you and commend you. However, in general this is NOT the rule. Especially, with people who aren’t happy and chasing the things in life they truly want.

This observation has been proven again and again over the years amongst different friends and family members who have been completely unconnected. I even may be unknowingly guilty of the same hypocrisy myself.

Yet, it’s not that these people are necessarily bad, first of all because it seems to be so unconsciously ingrained they 99.9% probably are not even aware they’re doing it. And two, they are only acting this way according to their own dissatisfactions and fears because what they are actually saying is not “I don’t want you to be happy”, it’s probably more along the lines of “If you succeed then I’ll have one less person to share my subtle discontentment with” or even worse “if I tried to go after what makes me happy I fear I’d fail because of all the doubts I’ve just listed to you”.

And the worst part about it is in my opinion they are all lies! The doubts your friend and family member has projected on to you and in addition the excuses they tell themselves as to why they can’t go after what they want.

Because the point is, whilst everyone will deep down have grandiose visions of what they want to become and a lot of excitement surrounding the actualisation of that vision. It isn’t the destination and completion of that vision, but the road walked to obtaining the vision where eventually after the initial bumps along the road that happiness is truly found. It’s in the process of becoming that we can gain peace, fulfilment, understanding and gratitude, not at the finish line, but along the way.

And everyone can start walking the path in some way towards what they want to do, even if it’s for 1 hour a week.